Posts Tagged ‘Reno SEO’

Proprietary Websites

Proprietary websites are everywhere; they offer cheap website designs and often, cheap hosting as well. However, there are free or open source options that provide much better benefits. There are a multitude of issues that come with this type of website platform – our top 5 are below:

Limited Design & Branding Options

No Ownership or Flexibility

No SEO Options

No Search Engine Respect

No Support

1. Limited Design & Branding Options

You are limited to the color palates, lay out templates, and widgets that they have available.

There are thousands of websites out there – and probably hundreds of businesses that do something similar to yours. So how do you stand out? Being online is important – including social media (but we’ve gone over that before); however, it doesn’t help to distinguish yourself when your website looks like everyone else’s. Your business is unique in some way, shape or form – show that to your clients!

2. No Ownership or Flexibility

You do not own your proprietary website – the creator does. If you want to move your site or use a different designer, you have to start from scratch. This is frustrating and costly as the services you have already paid for basically disappear and are wasted. You cannot take it with you when you leave – and if something happens to the business that created your proprietary website – you lose everything.

3. No SEO Options

Most websites are being created so people (clients or customers) can find them and buy the service or product you sell. The way a website is found by most people is through searching. We enter keywords or terms we think apply to our topic and a list of relevant websites is returned to us. These keywords or terms are coded into the back end of every webpage. Without them, your website can only be found by someone who has the exact address – so they already know you and your website.

These proprietary websites often have no way for you to set up your SEO (search engine optimization), which means no one will find your website unless you tell them how to get there. No searches will return your company and your website is pretty much useless for bringing in new clients.

4. No Search Engine Respect

If, by some miracle, your proprietary website has a special upgrade or ‘pro plan’ that will give you SEO options (for a price), you need to know one last thing: Search Engines can tell who built your website, and they don’t love proprietary site builders. If your search engine doesn’t respect your website, you are not likely to end up at the top of your target client’s search results; which means unhappiness for your business rather than increased sales and a bright new outlook on the future growth of your company and cash flow.

5. No Support

Let’s face it – things go wrong- and when they do, a great portion of our satisfaction with a service is the ability of the offender to make it right again. Most of these proprietary websites have clunky forms, round-a-bout ways to contact them, or no human response whatsoever. When your company reputation or your personal one depends on how you respond, you need to know that you have fast, reliable support available. This is usually not the case with a proprietary website – if you can find a way to contact them, they are not usually very efficient and an emergency on your part does not an emergency on their part make.

Our Recommendations

We have been designing and developing websites for many years – and we have learned that open source platforms are the most user-friendly, wholly owned, SEO ready, massively supported and unique option for websites today.

Platforms like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal make creating a customized, branded experience for your customers a simple, straight forward, and effective process for your business.

Call us today at 775-322-3663 to learn more about how Integris Marketing can help your website work for you!

Inbound linking or backlinks alert search engines to the popularity of your website or blog post. The more popular your site (more inbound links), the higher your ranking on search engine results pages.

Not All Links are Equal

There are many websites out there and whom you link from can affect the way a search engine looks at you and your content. Make sure you are being linked through websites that will help, not harm, your reputation (and your ranking).

Beneficial Links

High quality links are beneficial for any website. They link from relevant content on one website to relevant content on your website. The more often this sort of endorsement happens from trusted sites to yours, the better your websites rank.

Harmful Links

Harmful linking happens when irrelevant or “spammy” websites are linking to your relevant non-spammy website. These links can cause search engines to lower your ranking as a sort of “guilt by association”. This is partially to keep link spammers away from well meaning searches for real content. It is also why when you set up outbound links on your site that you keep them to relevant websites – otherwise, you are hurting that sites ranking – which they won’t take kindly.

Getting the Right Links

Getting the right links can increase traffic to your website (sometimes in a major way), which can increase sales or exposure and awareness at the least. If you aren’t link savvy, don’t worry, we can help!

We can train you to build your own relevant, high-quality inbound links, if you want to do it yourself, or we can build the links for you (we know you have lots going on). All our services are customized to your business needs and resources – we will work within your budget, too.

We also have some free tools to help you get started! We are available by phone as well at 775-322-3663.

Relevance in Search Results

When you use a search engine, like Google, you are looking for the match to the keywords you type in that are most relevant. This means they may have a local aspect if you are searching for restaraunts or movie theatres, as well as a date. Most of the time when we search for something, we want the most up to date results. If we are asking about information on movie times, we want them in a chronological order – with the most recent events first.

The Google Algorithm

Google is not only aware of this need, but they have worked out several updates to their algorithm that will impact the results returned based on the data stored about the pages – including dates. So what does this mean and why do you care?

A Common Problem

Here at Integris Marketing, we have several inquiries each week about how to show up at the top of the search engine results page. There are several things that can help, but we found this blog from Entrepreneur.com that covers an online strategy which we often promote ourselves as a continuing solution for keeping your website up to date and in the recent search engine results – a blog.

The Solution

Having a blog ensures that your website will be considered ‘updated’ each time you create and publish a post. This won’t solve all your problems, because it is important to have highly searched and relevant keywords set up in the meta fields for each of your website pages, but that is simple SEO and is fairly static. The solution with blogs is that Google will notice that you are updating and posting new information on your site, and as the blog describes, those that are not posting new content on their website will be left off the search engine results pages more and more in the future.

Additional Benefits of Blogging

This will not only give you the benefits of updating your website each time you post something, but it can also increase the engagement of your audience. You want to gain more customers, but with a good blog you can also build brand loyal customers, who trust you for pertinent information. Blogging can be easy and is often free, depending on the platform you use, so don’t delay – start your blog today!

If you would like customized help with setting up a blog and even finding content for your blog, please contact us today at 775.322.3663 or toll free at 1.800.233.0239!

Hey Reno Businesses… Want a Cool WordPress Blog Design?

Who doesn’t… but what you need to know is that having a “cool blog design” is no longer enough.

An Optimized WordPress Blog Design needs to capture visitors, show value, sell products or services, capture leads and keep up with the latest web technologies.

In the old days of the web… having a website… any website, whether a traditional static website filled with words, or a site of pretty pictures or even Flash animations was enough. It had the “wow” factor… All just because you had the site.

No more… Websites have become a very sophisticated platforms that are an important part of the promotional and marketing effort. The artifacts of yesteryear, such as the notoriously expensive, sales-rep hyped, and ineffective Yellow Page Ads or other less-than-targeted marketing vehicles and publications are becoming increasingly less effective. This is especially true for businesses who are forward thinking in their promotional approach, or have more sophisticated audiences they need to communicate with.

What’s the solution? First let’s look at what a website needs to do and fast-forward to today’s website demands before we decide.

Once they see your listing on Google (Hopefully first the page of Google or other search engine) it needs to be somewhat compelling in order for people to click on the link

The website needs to be inviting once they get there and give them relevant options for interaction, sales or sign-ups

Convey a sense of credibility and sophistication

Provide a comfortable experience that delivers value

Has ways for you to engage and track visitors

A tall order for any website no matter how big your budget is. Once you start considering the cost of website design, maintenance, updating and modification, content generation, software upgrades and you have the potential for a hornet’s nest of expense, complexity and less than optimal results.

The coolest, least expensive, most powerful, and highly customizable blog design platform that any business could hope for.

WordPress levels the playing field of the World Wide Web. The technology that WordPress uses, used to cost 10’s of thousands of dollars. But thanks to the WordPress and the Open Source community that supports it, WordPress has made the old expensive web paradigm a thing of the past. The powerful technology that is built into WordPress is free! And the plug-ins that support it… they are free too or are offered at a very low or modest cost.

A well executed WordPress Blog Design is the answer for what small businesses need to succeed on the web whether the need is superior design, uber-optimized SEO, or super-charged local search engine optimization.

In short, a well executed and well designed WordPress Blog embodies what the internet was designed for… optimized search engine results through relevant content generation.

If you need more information about how a WordPress Blog Design can help your business, you can give us a call (775.322.3663). But watch out, we love WordPress, so don’t be surprised if we talk your ear off.

Maybe not all that interesting to some folks… but what I do think it represents, is the idea that this area (Reno, Sparks, Truckee Meadows, Lake Tahoe) has tremendous talent and so many marketing and creative professionals for web design, graphic design, promotion, copywriting and even professional sales, all in a relatively small geographic area.

A real smorgasbord of options for local business no matter their size or budget.

Reno is definitely the place to be if you are looking for lots of options when it comes to finding a professional, or team of professionals, to help promote a business either online or with traditional media.

Reno: The Biggest Little City for Marketing Opportunities (and some of the nicest people you could want to meet).

(A special heart-felt kudos to all the amazing marketing minds and creative souls out there who really do make business sing… It is a wonder to behold all this talent!)